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My new cloud mostly works. For a while the client on my laptop was hanging and had to be restarted pretty regularly, but thankfully the latest version stopped that. And trying to sync contacts crashes Thunderbird, my free-and-open mail program; this appears to be the fault of a plug-in, or maybe it’s me. When I have a spare moment, I work on fixing it. (I should get better about filing bug reports.) I’ll figure it out eventually, or someone else in the vast and geeky community will. We always do.
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Such hope, however, should not be mistaken for a cure-all. Like fair trade coffee, the farmers’ market, and the neighborhood credit union, my commitments to Emacs and May First involve a certain self-righteousness. The impact on macroeconomic realities is limited. “Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you’re raising chickens,” political theorist Jodi Dean has remarked. Eric Schmidt doesn’t care if I’m using Emacs. But I care, and I like it. And I do feel that it matters.
There is a habit in tech culture of saying that the latest app is “democratizing” whatever it happens to do. This is lovely, but best not to confuse it with actual democracy. Democracy is about participation with control, freedom with accountability, privacy with transparency. Tech companies tend to pick and choose from that list rather inventively. We’re expected to participate in their networks without having control over how they work. We’re transparent about every detail of our lives with them, while they’re private about what they do with it. Free-and-open software, however, operates on a different time-scale. Since nobody owns it, it’s harder to become fabulously wealthy from it. People make these programs because they need them, not because they think they can manipulate someone to want them. It’s slower. Instead of relying on rich kids in a Googleplex somewhere, Slow Computing works best when we’re employing people nearby, like Jamie McClelland, to adapt open tools to local needs. He’s my farmer; May First is my CSA.